DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) – Cafes in various Arab Gulf states started selling coffee and other soft drinks in baby bottles this month, launching a new trend that has sparked excitement, confusion and setbacks.
The fad started at Einstein Cafe, a sleek dessert chain with branches across the region, from Dubai to Kuwait to Bahrain. Instead of plain paper cups, the cafe, inspired by photos of trendy bottles shared on social media, decided to serve its thick milk drinks in plastic bottle bottles.
Although the franchise was no newcomer to baby-themed products – a milkshake with cerelac, the rice cereal for babies, is a long-selling bestseller – the unprecedented sheen over the nutrition bottles was a bit of a shock. It seems that all the tension and anxiety about the coronavirus pandemic has prompted some to find an outlet in the strange new craze.
“Everyone wanted to buy it, people called all day and said they were going with their friends, they were coming with their father and mother,” Younes Molla, chief executive of the Einstein franchise in the United Arab Emirates, told The Associated said. Print this week. “After so many months with the pandemic, with all the problems, people took pictures, they had fun, they remembered their childhoods.”
Lines clogged Einstein stores across the Gulf. People of all ages flocked to sidewalks waiting for their chance to suck coffee and juice out of a plastic bottle. Some patrons even brought their own baby bottles to other cafes and begged bewildered baristas to fill them up.
Photos of baby bottles filled with colorful kaleidoscopes of drinks have attracted thousands of likes on Instagram and picked out in the popular social media app TikTok. A cure for the world’s uncertainty? A reaction to some primal instinct? Either way, a trend has been born.
Soon, however, online haters took notice – the baby drinkers and suppliers of baby bottles came face to face with an avalanche of nasty comments.
“People were so angry that they said horrible things that we were an ‘aeb’ to Islam and Muslim culture,” Molla said, using the Arabic term for shame or dishonor.
Last week, anger reached its highest levels of government. The Dubai authorities hated it. Inspection teams burst into cafes where the trend flared up and handed out fines.
‘Such indiscriminate use of baby bottles is not only against local culture and traditions,’ reads the government statement, ‘but the misuse of the bottle during filling may also contribute to the spread of COVID-19’, a apparent reference to those who take their used bottles to other cafes.
The statement said authorities had been “informed of the negative practice and its risks by social media users”.
There have also been setbacks from Kuwait, where the government temporarily closed Einstein Cafe, and from Bahrain, to which the Ministry of Trade sent police armed with live cameras to cafes and warned all eateries that drinks served in feed bottles were “in conflict with the traditions and the traditions of Bahrain. ”
Oman has urged citizens to report observations of baby bottles to the consumer protection hotline. Saudi Twitter users and media personalities condemned the trend in the harshest terms, and popular news site Mujaz al-Akhbar lamented that the daughters of the kingdom had a loss of modesty and religion. ‘
This is not the first time that the guardians of local customs in Arab countries have focused their anger on social media phenomena. Vague laws across the region give authorities great power to eradicate immorality and immorality. For example, Emirates officers arrested a young expat last spring for posting a video on TikTok in which he sneezed into a banknote, accusing him of tarnishing the UAE and its institutions.